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January 2011

The most important item in Amon Chimphepo’s medical kit is a small cell phone. This single piece of technology has proved to be a lifeline for people living in one of the most remote regions of Malawi. Its power to reach and initiate help immediately from the closest hospital is saving lives and improving health outcomes. In fact, I met a woman, alive today, because Mr. Chimphepo and his cell phone were there to make an emergency call to the district hospital and get an ambulance.

In Aswan, Egypt’s sunniest southern city located about one and a half hours by plane from Cairo, the Nile is at its most striking. Tropical plants grow along the edges of the flowing river, and the amber desert and granite rocks surround orchards of palm trees.

January 12, 2011 marks the one year anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I have the good fortune of visiting MSH’s USAID-funded SDSH (Santé pour le Développement et la Stabilité d’Haíïti) project team in Port-au-Prince this week, and I traveled out into the city to see the devastation the earthquake caused.

It has been a catastrophic year for Haitians. The Haitians themselves say this, a people who are used to dealing with poverty, combined with yearly hurricanes, and near constant political instability. However, one thing has been made clear to me in the past few days that I have been on this island: Life Goes On.

Haiti, One Year On: Realizing Country Ownership in a Fragile State

This Washington DC event will be webcast live. You can tune in and join the discussion, below, starting at 3:00 p.m.

Dr. Florence Duperval Guillaume, MSH’s Deputy Chief of Party and Technical Director, Santé pour le Développement et la Stabilité d’Haíïti, will be discussant at this Oxfam America-hosted policy discussion to examine aid effectiveness in Haiti within the context of country ownership. Other speakers will include:

Prior to January 12, 2010, Management Sciences for Health’s Leadership, Management and Sustainability Program was working with Haiti’s Ministry of Public Health and Population to build capacity in several areas: family planning and reproductive health; commodity management and security; coordinating HIV & AIDS awareness and community mobilization activities; and leadership development.

But after the terrible earthquake of one year ago, we who normally promote leadership in the health sector were faced with our own leadership challenges: how to continue to lead and manage our program effectively during an ongoing crisis, and most importantly, how to ensure continued help to those who rely on LMS support. Our immediate priority: dealing with the collapse and destruction of our office. For months, we worked out of large tent constructed next to the LMS warehouse, a reminder everyday that many of those we were serving had been forced to move into temporary shelters.

SDSH is a USAID-funded health project in Haiti supporting decentralization, strengthening public-sector capacity in service delivery, and supporting local nongovernmental organization service delivery.

Ryan Cherlin, USAID, wrote this blog after a recent visit to Haiti. This blog post was originally posted on USAID's IMPACT Blog.

When a Haitian says, Dí¨yí¨ mí²n gen mí²n, they mean to say, as you solve one problem there is always another that must also be solved.

Driving through the densely populated city of Port-au-Prince I wondered how many times this old proverb was the subject of conversation this past year.

In the months following the earthquake in early January 2010, Haitians endured the devastating effects of hurricane Tomas, political instability and violence stemming from a presidential election, and a cholera epidemic.

For the past week, we in Southern Sudan have crowded polling stations to vote on a referendum that, if passed, would declare Southern Sudan the world’s newest nation. Observers have declared the voting “broadly fair,” and the 60 percent voter turnout required for the vote to pass has been reached. We are optimistic that this referendum will bring us closer to a peaceful, prosperous future.

The mood in Juba (the capital city of Southern Sudan) is bright as we await the results of the polls, set to be announced February 1. But our government and people realize that secession will bring new challenges along with its opportunities. About 150,000 of our Southern Sudanese brothers and sisters have returned home in recent weeks and still more are expected. While we welcome them joyfully and are delighted to see extended families reunited, this great influx of people will put additional strain on a health system that already struggles to meet the needs of the people it serves.

Human rights are no longer considered peripheral to the AIDS response. Human rights are an essential tool of public health. 80% of countries explicitly acknowledge or address human rights in their national AIDS strategies. However, 80 countries still have punitive laws against people with HIV which pose significant challenges to the AIDS response

In the past decade, there have been some major developments in the HIV epidemic. New cases have decreased, 5 million people are now on treatment, and people are discussing the importance of human rights in relation to the disease. However, 33 million people are infected and only one-third of those in need of treatment are receiving it.

The Global Health Initiative (GHI) and its approach of integrating health programs with HIV & AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, maternal, newborn, and child health, nutrition, and family planning and reproductive health is in line with the current approaches and health priorities of the Government of Malawi.

Malawi, with a population of slightly over 13 million people, has 83% of its people living in the rural hard to reach, underserved areas. The biggest health challenge facing the country is access to basic health services by the rural population. The problem of access to health services is multifaceted. For instance, family planning services are mostly facility-based, contributing to a low Contraceptive Prevalence Rate of 28% and high unmet family planning need of 28% (Malawi Demographic and Health Survey, 2004).

However, there is also a critical shortage of trained health service providers and availability of contraceptives is a logistical nightmare in Malawi. Making a routine mix of all contraceptives accessible to women of reproductive age regularly in rural communities can avert unwanted pregnancies and maternal deaths, and reduce high total fertility rate and infant mortality rate. Rural people walk long distances to seek health services, sometimes only to return without a service due to shortage of health personnel and stock-out of supplies.

MSH & The Tao of Leadership

Partnership and Empowerment: We take our inspiration from the 3,500 year old Tao (Way) of Leadership, working shoulder to shoulder with our local colleagues and partners toward their empowerment and success.